Bearing Witness to the Times: Aleppo After the Fall

Ruins near the citadel in Aleppo’s Old City. Credit Sebastián Liste/Noor Images, for The New York Times

"Aleppo After the Fall: As the Syrian civil war turns in favor of the regime, a nation
adjusts to a new reality – and a complicated new picture of the conflict emerges"

(title of article in The New York Times Magazine)

Aleppo After the Fall

In a city so ancient

That a merchant can stand on a street corner

Where his blood ancestor may have stood

Three thousand years before,
There comes a haphazard reprieve from war.

A weary silence falls
Where streets once bustled

With sales of fabric and spice

Amid the sweet cacophony

Of exuberant traders and pilgrims.

Like a shattered plate,

The courtyard of The Great Mosque

Now lies in fragments –

The hundreds of daily footsteps

But a prayerful memory.

Children play –

When they dare come out –

In the rubble-strewn side streets

While old men try to remember

The ancient pathways.

A flute still plays in the distance;

A dancer regains her steps.

The rest of us settle

Into a strange new world

Where victory is as dangerous as defeat.

                                                                      ~ CK

“On March 7, 2006, the sun rises on Aleppo. Aleppo, along with Damascus and Sana'a, is one of the three oldest inhabited cities in human history,  added to UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1986.” (From The Atlantic Monthly, “Aleppo Before the War"  - Photo by Khaled Al Hariri / Reuters)

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